KALIE JOHNSON | GOD SEEMS SMALLER THAN THE SUN

April 24, 2023

God Seems Smaller than the Sun

I was alone during the solar eclipse, watched across an empty, unraveling yard as a middle school boy with pimples big as the clouds watched the sun through a box of upside-down Apple Jacks. I held heavy, blacked-out glasses to my face and stared at the sun, dared myself to peek without them; I was always a coward. Quiet rustled in the grass like bird prints in muddy snow or never-finished tree carvings. You knew something was there, but now it was over. The sun was stolen. Lost Sun listing, my rain-soaked flyer with the numbered tabs at the bottom. Take a number if you have any information; I realized no one’s answers were enough.

I watched with toes in desperate grass and found myself missing the almostness of electrocution in my eyes while driving, missing the sun when it filters in through morning's frost-tipped windows, the careless rising of the sun like children’s scraped knees from intentionally breaking their mother’s back. You have to accept pain to cause it; the sun accepted mine with open flames instead of embraces. I never knew I needed the sun until I had to look away, felt my eyes watch the boy and his cereal box, tilting, tilting against the green grass of gravity. I think now would be the best time to swim, to fall into water, lay in a pool of sunless blue--drowning when the world is fragile.

I go inside and cry, know a new kind of betrayal. It is no longer sun-crisped worms on sidewalks, wiggling, edging towards grass, but convulsing into letters that spell out “you could have saved me.” Funny how worms make better use of ABCs. I do not fear ant deaths or burning alive or my father's girlfriend's sun tattoo. I do not fear anything but the sun's disappearance now. When I wake the next day, my only mantra is "I hope the sun will rise today," the only thing I can count on has fallen away, and like broken love, I am left to wonder if it will come back.

My fingers grazed the surface of the sun that day, pried open the fragile wiring that held me from it once before. I let my grandmother tell them it was an accident when I shattered from swinging, hustling, touching with the tips of sticky fingers before I broke silence for gravel kisses and caterpillar tears that clambered across my face, more a reaction to the fear of knowing I reached the sun than from scratching, grey rocks.

I quit rising with the sun after that, backed against the ridges of my knuckles for support as the sun rolling pins over the wet newspaper in the driveway and floods against my dad packing lunch at 6 am, the smell of cigarettes already clinging to his fingers. Another day, another fight with God. Hands are just placeholders like the rising sun, which coffee-drips into the room, rasps its way to every corner, begs the comforter to part again. Why do we leave bed today? I cannot rise with the sun any longer, fear the beginning of morning, my parents waking.

By noon, you realize the sun was not meant for broken families, fought against the sigh of fatherless children, stumbled over missing mothers and empty closets, coat hangers knocking against each other in dusty bitterness, a constant reminder that someone walked out and never came back. We are hanging by them now, a poorly trained trapeze artist falling into unemployment. Daytime is slow, chalk up the cracked sidewalk and my father’s bible across the brim of the toilet. Leave the family alone; let them mourn.

I take warm rain and lightning strikes for morning kisses now, the rasp of my father’s day-old voice is a whistle through the window screen, except it is just the drag of a dying mouse, a gift in the watermelon belly of my youth, the sticking of thighs to wicker chairs. Children draw wiggles of spaghetti suns, and we tell them never look, never stare, never draw attention, shame, power. It is funny they are all the same. Shame at the solar system; shame at my own religion. My craft scissors in my dry hair, I sit beside my brother, run inside from the scrutiny of the sun, and sip tomato juice. I ask my father if anything bleeds blue. He says our blood is blue, but by the time it meets air, it is red. I wonder if the sun is the same way and pull at the skin from my fingernails. The suns of keratin crawl from my flesh and glaze your skin in prisms of downward spirals and gentle ballerina bounces.

I hold up the glass prism that has fallen off the branches of my grandmother's shrinking cactus, watch the sun shatter across the room, hit her fireplace, the chair I napped in on Tuesday, and compose itself across her sunflower paintings. The cat wakes up when the room starts dancing, steno green eyes knowing life is at play. God, can you hear me? I set the prism back in the dirt, let the rainbows slide into the grains of the walls, and realize the sun is always gone when someone dies.

God Seems Smaller Than the Moon

Beneath freckle constellations and baby powder snow, I realize moon clippings cannot survive on their own. I know now that I can dry-swallow the moon in doctor office gulps, drink in stubborn grace that tastes like grape cough syrup, and chuckle at how silly we were back then. It is a nighttime swim you cannot take with me.

Yet, I fear I will never be unaffected by night. Night fooled me, told me the boy who sang me love songs while cradled side by side in the thickening of his comforter did not want real intimacy. Tricked into pinpricks of starry-eyed romance, I felt along the ribbons of his throat when I laid down to hear him sing--deepen, darken nighttime with the soft soaking that told me this moment was everlasting. Atonement never felt so easy. When the night ended, I skipped beneath the moon, opened the window to sleep aside thunder that shook my pillow with possession. It ended, cycled into the baby tones of emptying night into day, where neither one of us claimed we know the other any longer.

But I used to claim the night with hot-watered conviction. My grandmother ripped me from my bed after every storm. 2 am, 3 am, the draining of nighttime could not stop her. She rattled a strobing flashlight from her rough hands into my own sleeping fingers. Are you leaving? Please shut off the lights. I stumbled in rain boots across sliding grass and searched the top of the mud for worms. I felt invasive, stealing light that did not belong to anyone but the moon to reveal scrawling expanses I’d never wanted to disrupt. Scooping stolen nightcrawlers into buckets wasn’t my only nighttime church service. Grandma taught me to kneel in silence and give God my mind. But she could speak in tongues, and I couldn’t pronounce my W's. I feared her, begged her to stop. Do not deny God. I removed the window screen and knelt until the church service I had rambled at the half moon was met with wet mosquito bites or the taillights of my neighbor’s car heating up on the waffle crunch snow. I never left the house without a flashlight again.

The first time I saw the moon was in my father’s fingernails, the soft crescent hills of calico calcium reflecting the moon I later threw rocks at. I found my guilt in his fingertips; feared it all in the midst of waves of geodes cracking into a nighttime heartbeat. My grandma spoke in tongues again; rhythm matches the crickets. God is talking back and dripping from the base of Van Gogh’s moon. He painted that crumbling cookie moon in spiraling yellow that thickened above a sleeping city. We were both made for the night shift. The nocturnal only know the power of religion in waxes and wanes.

They all know the moon. Bukowski wrote of deadbeat winters and turned every icy forgotten father into a gospel. And I, I am battling dusty Mondays, finding the meaning of life in curling L's and $20 books. Dusty Mondays that dance under nailbeds of satellite suns, dew drops drip from rusting gutters. The moon is careless tonight. I am riding a journey of night upon day and day upon night; I trust that love is the meaning of life. The car kisses the garage doors, ducks beneath hail like lemon cough drops. I wonder if God cowers beneath the Sun and Moon too.

Kalie Johnson is a 25-year-old living near Chicago. She's published in BW's The Mill, California State's Watershed Review, Fatal Flaws Literary Magazine, The Bookends Review, Coffin Bell Journal, and The Quillkeeper's Press. She is looking forward to being published with THAT Literary Review and Jet Fuel Review. When she’s not writing, she enjoys seeing the world, hiking, roller skating, and camping. You can find her writing Instagram at @thingsfeelwrite.

JOHN T. PRICE | THE BURNT PLANE

The Burnt Plane

As Jason Murphy’s mom drove us to the farm, I wondered how it would look now that his dad was dead. It had been almost a year. I pictured man-high weeds and rusty tractors, the house dark and empty, the giant barn rotting with its roof caved in and black birds flying out the broken windows. But my first step out of the car was onto freshly mown grass. Jason’s uncle was waving from the front porch of the house. Jason joined me, and we ran toward the barn, which was still standing, and slid open the huge doors. Inside, the light from the upper windows shot down through the dusty air, burning leopard spots onto the floorboards. It smelled of oil and wood and hay, like always.

Jason called me over to the space behind the loft stairs. The frame of an old yellow bike rested on the floor, its pieces scattered nearby. Jason planned to fix it up, he said, so he could ride it that summer. Today he was putting on the handlebars, and asked me to get the toolbox.

The box, dented and gray, had been set on one of the mismatched workbenches still lining the walls. Its metallic luster stood out against the dust-covered machine parts lying around it. Here and there, I could make out hand prints in the dirty surface, which were probably his uncle’s, but which made me think of Mr. Murphy. Big and dark, part-Indian, he said, ace pilot and WWII hero. Mr. Murphy had always been glad to see me, even after my baby brother died the previous spring, and I spent more time at their farm than usual. He’d never been afraid to put me and Jason, just third graders, to work on one of the junk cars he claimed was not yet beyond hope. That kind of work is good for boys, he’d say, and then place impossibly gentle hands on our shoulders, hands that otherwise swallowed everything they touched, including this box, the one I was now somehow lifting on my own.

Jason held the handlebars out in front of him, twisting them right then left, steering through invisible curves. He set them by the bike and pulled a wrench from the toolbox. The wrench was large and grimy, and when it slipped off the nut, Jason’s wrist bent toward the floor, but he didn’t drop it.

“Don’t you miss him?” I asked.

He ignored me, just like the last time I’d asked, and the time before that. He put the wrench down and walked outside. I followed him down the long grassy airstrip to the sheet-metal shed with the tattered wind sock on top. We walked around the side, stepping through a thicket of tall grass until we reached a big shoebox-shaped something made of interconnected, metal rods.

“This is the plane my dad got killed in,” he said, stepping inside the charred, rusty frame. He sat down on the bare steel of the pilot’s seat.

I crawled into the space behind him and sat on the wet grass. The last time I’d seen this plane was in a newspaper photo my mom had shown me, its black tail smoking and sticking straight up out of the corn field where Mr. Murphy had been crop-dusting. I was in that same tail, I guessed, but it was hard to imagine that this had once been his plane—no wings, no propeller, no metal skin. Weeds and vines were growing up through it.

“I like to sit here sometimes,” Jason said with his back to me. “I see things.”

I didn’t understand, but then I leaned back on my elbows and let my gaze move up the slope of my friend’s skull and launch itself over the shed, the barn, and into the atmosphere. Up there, the plane’s skeleton vanished, along with my own, until there was nothing but sky. I wondered if this was the same sky Mr. Murphy saw all those times, and the last time. A sky big enough to carry him over any place or time that ever meant something to him—an ancient Indian hunting ground, a battlefield in France, a cornfield in Iowa. Maybe over our own selves right then, sitting on the ground, looking up.

We stayed there a while, long enough for me to know. Then I followed Jason back to the barn. We had work to do.

The Burnt Plane was originally published in Brevity Journal.